Christopher A. Ferrara on the Abdication of Pope Benedict XVI

Something Wicked This Way Comes (via The Thinking Housewife)

"Why, then, did Benedict XVI abdicate, and so suddenly? The proffered explanation of declining health and strength, which has afflicted any number of Popes who remained in office until God called them, would suggest a Pope who has simply failed in the virtue of perseverance and done something contemptible. (Dante for this reason places Pope Celestine in Hell.)"

A pious belief that is not really the true standard of service and perseverence? If one he without good reason (because one is "tired" of the work) then this may be a charact assessment of his character. But if decliningi health prevents one from carrying out ones duties well, or even adequately? That is entirely different. The good of the Church is at stake.

Tellingly, what appear to be Pope Benedict’s final three acts of canonization—generally acknowledged by theologians to be an infallible act of the Magisterium because it establishes a cult for the universal Church—involved only classic candidates for sainthood.

This has not be defined by the Magisterium? As for establishing a cult for the universal church - is this explicitly stated in the decree? I would have to check. Is it possible though that the pope could be confused as to whether he was making a proclamation for the Church universal as the supreme pontiff, rather than as the patriarch of Rome (or of the West)?

Mr. Ferrera offers a hypothesis:

This is quite unlike the non-infallible beatification of John Paul II, establishing only a local cult in the dioceses of Rome and Krakow (although this crucial distinction was promptly ignored). Concerning this beatification, Vatican spokesmen offered the astonishing rationale that “Pope John Paul II is being beatified not because of his impact on history or on the Catholic Church, but because of the way he lived the Christian virtues of faith, hope and love... John Paul II is being beatified for holiness, not his papacy….” A Pope whose beatification had nothing to do with his pontificate, and yet is called “the Great,” is another of the innumerable oddities that litter the post-conciliar landscape of the Church.

Now, Pope Benedict’s abdication is to take effect a mere seventeen days from today, on February 28, 2013 at precisely 8 p.m. This means that Benedict will avoid the dubious canonization of John Paul II and the simply absurd beatification of Paul VI. The steamroller driving toward those vexatious events, sweeping aside all reasonable objections, has suddenly been stopped dead in its tracks.  Did the Pope abdicate, at least in part, to slow down John Paul II’s saint-making machine, which was threatening to canonize the Council of which Benedict himself (in his more candid moments) has been so critical?  We may be permitted to think so.

But one might ask, was not Benedict XVI one of the biggest supporters for raising John Paul II to the altars? It would seem so from his public statements. Benedict XVI was the originator and the most public proponent of the "hermeneutic of continuity"? Could he himself have been thinking that this was merely a temporary face-saving measure, rather than a true salvaging of the council from abusive post-conciliar interpretations?  Mr. Ferrera has a response:

It stands to reason that if Benedict were at all committed to the idea of “Saint John Paul II the Great” and “Blessed Paul VI,” he would have remained in office at least long enough to perform the necessary papal acts. Yet he has left office, in a purely discretionary manner, just as those acts were slated to occur—during the ironically designated “Year of Faith” that is taking place in the midst of the “silent apostasy” that is our inheritance from the previous two pontificates.

Actually, two:

Or perhaps, even if this was not the Pope’s conscious intent, the Holy Ghost has intervened by prompting him to abdicate rather than inflicting further damage to the Church by acceding to the Council’s canonization via improvident acts of the Magisterium.

But, of course, Mr. Ferrara writes as a rather ultramontane traditionalist:

But we can be certain that the wolves the Pope has in view are preeminently the ones nearest to him, encircling him within the very confines of a Vatican bureaucracy that has crushed the monarchical papacy under the massive machinery of an ecclesiastical democracy installed during the post-conciliar revolution, with its “collegiality” and its “reform” of the Roman Curia.

He would probably not approve of any efforts to decentralize or reform the governing structure of the Church, as they would threaten the nature of the papacy itself.

The Church is in reform, but perhaps not in the direction that the ultramontanists or the traditionalists expect -  Benedict XVI may have realized from the very beginning of his pontificate that he was not the man for the task, given his advanced age and the current conditions of the Roman-rate churches. But is the slow process of placing good bishops the only possible avenue for reform? (Especially if the quality of the bishops and their orthodoxy is rather questionable, despite the appearance of doctrinal orthodoxy and fidelity?)

Related:

A traditionalist look at the Council, with remarks against collegiality - but can there not be false and true definitions of collegiality, epending on one's ecclesiology? Unless one subscribes to a strictly monarchical view of the pope and the Church. Indeed, to identify the Church as the People of God is hardly to ascribe some notion of popular sovereignty to the governance of the Church. It is an understanding of the Church rooted in scripture and salvific history. I find the piece to have mistaken ascriptions and a rather uncharitable reading of what the pope said. Did Sacrosanctum Concilium sanction what happened with the production and promulgation of the Missal of Paul VI? I do not think so. Was this what Paul VI thought the Council Fathers intended? I am not sure.
Will the Real Second Vatican Council Please Stand up! by Brian M. McCall

Is American Catholicism at a Crossroads? (What is American Catholicism?) by R. Cort Kirkwood

Our friend MB recommends the following address given by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury at San Anselmo University: 'Benedict and the Future of Europe.'

Much of what he writes concerning communal life and the need for a more humane economy is good. The biggest objection I would have would be to his discussion of cultural diversity. Culturally diverse Christian polities in Europe? Wonderful. Cultural diversity within a political community? Problematic.

The community envisaged by the Rule is therefore not in any way a unit dominated by individual will, however strongly the injunctions may be phrased about surrendering to authority. That authority attempts to be, not representative in the modern sense, but at least systematically attentive to the diversity of character and experience within the community. Most significantly, perhaps, the community's discipline does not assume that there is a 'natural' order of precedence established by the world outside which dictates the degree to which you are taken seriously in the community. Seniority is a matter determined within the monastery (chapter 63), primarily related to the date of entry, except as the abbot may determine. It is, we could say, the scope of your involvement in the community's life that defines your standing, not any external criterion such as wealth or social status or education, or even chronological age. Put the other way around, no-one's voice in the community is automatically dismissed or minimised because of the lack of wealth, status and so on. The community is one in which the 'currency' of exchange is not restricted by social or historic accident; commitment to the community is the ground upon which the right to be heard is based.

Once again, how does all this relate to the questions we might want to put to our continent and its culture at the present time? The first point is obviously about the valuation of diversity in the Rule. It is not anything remotely resembling the rather passive pluralism, which seems to be the default position of many kinds of post modernity. There is a clear and unambiguous assumption that there is such a thing as a common good and that therefore each distinct diverse perspective is open to challenge; Benedictine obedience is to do with this, not with some generalised submission of one person's will to the power of another. But there is an equally unambiguous refusal of any sort of competitive struggle for the dominance of one individual or group, and a set of checks and balances to offset any risk attaching to the strong emphasis on the abbot's authority. Authority is the negotiating of a variety of gifts in order to sustain a society in which all are at work for the sake of each other's flourishing and (in the monastic context) holiness).

In the macro political scene, this implies a serious valuation of cultural diversity - of local language and custom - and a suspicion of those trends that associate authority either with an isolated professional class or with an economically dominant partner in the community of states. The bureaucratic urge to homogenise is one which Christians have every reason to resist; and the characteristic style of international planning and debate needs to allow the less materially advantaged partners a free voice. One of the more positive factors of some of the language of European politics in recent decades has been the emphasis on regional autonomy - a recognition that the solid and inflexible concepts of national sovereignty that have prevailed in the modern period cannot do full justice to actual cultural diversity and the need for appropriate local freedoms.

A European community (in the strict sense, and in the looser sense of the general geographical ensemble of European countries) that reflected something of the Benedictine vision would be one in which smaller nations and minorities within nations would be assured of a voice. And, to pick up a point that is especially pertinent in our present situation, it would be one that did not panic about migrants. The migrant group that is prepared to work within the civic framework of a host society, that aspires simply to citizenship, is one whose voice in the community overall is of significance alongside those who have a longer history and a political or economic advantage. Once within the relationships of purposeful common life, the facts of coming from ethnically or religiously different backgrounds should not disenfranchise them. The basic importance of 'obedience', in the full sense give by the Rule to that word, requires governing authorities to listen to diversity and to ask how the overall balance of nation or transnational grouping needs to be adjusted so as to incorporate both the gifts and the needs of the incoming stranger who is seeking not simply hospitality (the Rule's priorities are clear about what to do in such a case) but shared belonging.

How this is achievable when we confront groups whose basic assumptions about civic identity appear to be different from our own historic ideals is of course a major challenge. While it is a facile and dangerous fiction to think of Islamic civic ideals and Christian or Western ones as so different that they cannot be sensibly compared, there is undoubtedly a spectrum of understanding from the ideologically secular liberal through to the most inflexible Muslim primitivist (the kind who elects to ignore most of Islamic history and jurisprudence in favour of a supposed adherence to the bare data of initial revelation). But once we have stopped thinking of this as inevitably a standoff between rational pluralism and simple theocracy - once we have actually begun to think about how to conduct debates over civic identity across some of these frontiers - the way is open to a properly 'Benedictine' questioning as to how we shape a common civic purpose out of these new diversities rather than assuming that this is now a level of diversity with which we can't cope.

I think he is rather optimistic about a community formed in a Christian Western civilization being able to maintain some semblance of harmony when cultural diversity is extended to include (a sizable population of) Muslims.

Democrats and Jihadists: A Love Affair by R. Cort Kirkwood

Pontificio Ateneo S. Anselmo